Thursday, June 24, 2010

The plight of the Right

It is clear that the American political right, and therefore the Republican party, is fracturing. During the Bush-Cheney years the neoconservative and corporatist elites defined the conservative agenda, at least so far as mainstream media was concerned. Their chumps were the schmucks too beguiled by a blend of Christian Crusader fundamentalism and Manifest Destiny mythology to realize how they were being exploited. Eventually the costs to the working class victims of the elite policies, first in the foreign interventions then in the domestic economy, costs the elites themselves typically did not bear, provoked a poorly focused "populist" revolt of sorts among the shorn and plucked. They have begun to doubt the elite right-wing propaganda but, being endemically stupid, many of these manage to blame "liberals" and "socialists" for their troubles despite a clear historical record pointing to the true authors of their misery.